Jurgen Habermas Quotes

While it is true that science cannot decide questions of value, that is because they cannot be intellectually decided at all, and lie outside the realm of truth and falsehood. Whatever knowledge is attainable, must be attained by scientific methods; and what science cannot discover, mankind cannot know.

After all, all knowledge simply means self-knowledge.

Philosophy wasn't about facts, it was about ideas. My first essay title was something like: 'How can you know what other people are thinking?' I thought, 'Wow, what an amazing thing.' I really thought deeply for the first time.

Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.

Knowledge is invariably a matter of degree: you cannot put your finger upon even the simplest datum and say this we know.

Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.

I know nothing, except the fact of my ignorance.

Even scientific knowledge, if there is anything to it, is not a random observation of random objects; for the critical objectivity of significant knowledge is attained as a practice only philosophically in inner action.

Philosophy is the product of wonder.

Our questions and answers are in part determined by the historical tradition in which we find ourselves. We apprehend truth from our own source within the historical tradition.

Who are we? The answer to this question is not only one of the tasks but the task of science.

Knowledge consists in understanding the evidence that establishes the fact, not in the belief that it is a fact.

No Discourse whatsoever, can End in absolute Knowledge of Fact.

All human knowledge thus begins with intuitions, proceeds thence to concepts, and ends with ideas.

Let not men think there is no truth, but in the sciences that they study, or the books that they read.

Positivism stands or falls with the principle of scientism, that is that the meaning of knowledge is defined by what the sciences do and can thus be adequately explicated through the methodological analysis of scientific procedures.

Human thought by its nature is capable of giving, and does give, absolute truth, which is compounded of a sum-total of relative truths.

I am a philosopher, not a scientist, and we philosophers are better at questions than answers.

Science is not wisdom.

There is no single truth, but each of the scholarly disciplines has methods which lead one ever closer to the truth.

Philosophical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from concepts ; mathematical knowledge is the knowledge gained by reason from the construction of concepts.

Philosophy is true mother of the arts [of science].

I have often wondered and even laughed at those who fancied that everything had been so consummately and absolutely investigated by an Aristotle or a Galen or some other mighty name, that nothing could by any possibility be added to their knowledge.

Mathematicians have sought knowledge in figures, Philosophers in systems, Logicians in subtleties, and Metaphysicians in sounds. It is not in any nor in all of these. He that studies only men, will get the body of knowledge without the soul, and he that studies only books, the soul without the body.

One can study what exists and how consciousness functions; but one cannot analyze (or “prove”) existence as such, or consciousness as such. These are irreducible primaries. (An attempt to “prove” them is self-contradict ory: it is an attempt to “prove” existence by means of nonexistence, and consciousness by means of unconsciousness .)